| TEL@FTELab |

Technology Enhanced Learning @ Future Teacher Education Lab

Project TEL@FTELab assumes that technology enhanced teacher education programs may represent a relevant added value to the quality of prospective teachers’ training and therefore of its teaching practices.

The aim of the project is both to find answers to the question: How does technology in learning spaces offer opportunities to provide innovative ways of designing teacher education for the future, and to provide research-based resources for teacher education in the areas of Biology, Informatics, Mathematics and Physics.

The project takes the idea that the future will blur the boundaries between living, learning and working and this will result in the creation of flexible multiuse spaces that can accommodate different activities and serve different learning purposes. This leads to the need for rethinking educational spaces and didactic approaches involving a wide range of stakeholders. The project articulates the piloting of real experiments in initial teacher education courses with an analysis and development of a 21st century teacher skills framework.

The pilots that constitute the empirical field of the project will be carried within courses of the Master Program on Teaching of Institute of Education (IE) and developed in the context of specific courses of Initial Supervised Practice.

Key research questions:

i) what is distinctive about teacher education in technology enhanced learning spaces?ii) what key competences should be part of teachers’ repertoire for the future?iii) how does technology enhanced teacher education can serve the preparation of teachers?

The Project combines technology, creativity and teacher education design in order to create a challenging context for the development of ideas, guidelines and products that serve teachers’ preparation to become innovative practitioners. For that purpose, IE leads the project and includes a group of partners acting as key participants in two fundamental tasks: the design and setup of the Future Teacher Education Lab (FTALab) and the implementation of strategies for the dissemination and mainstreaming of the results of the project.

This project aims to develop knowledge that fills the need of powerful engaging strategies to deliver teacher education courses for the future. It is organized in three phases. Phase I is concerned with the design and setup of FTELab and training modules and the development of a 3D 21st century teacher skills framework. Phase II is the time for piloting the modules, in two consecutive cycles of implementation, within the Master Programs on Teaching. Each cycle of piloting includes the co design of learning scenarios between teacher educators and student teachers and its experimentation in real secondary school classes of Biology, Informatics, Mathematics and Physics. Phase III takes the data collected and analyzed and produces a set of video cases, training modules and learning scenarios that together with the 3D framework compose the Teacher Education Toolkit delivered at the end.

It is adopted a design-based research approach blending empirical educational research with theory-driven design of learning environments that is seen as a relevant methodology for understanding how, when, and why educational innovations work in practice. Data will be collected to provide evidence of how student teachers learn in a technology enriched learning space and will inform the dimensions and indicators of the 3D 21st century teacher skills framework. Instruments to be used will be developed as questionnaires and focus group interview protocols together with social network analysis.

The project has a rather strong agenda for dissemination and mainstreaming. Dissemination will go through the traditional channels including publication of articles in scientific journals (with prevalence to those of international circulation) and communications in conferences. Additionally, dissemination will address other key audiences and stakeholders through the completion of PhD thesis and Master dissertations and other stakeholders as indicated by the commercial partners. Mainstreaming addresses the need to put the results and products of the project at the service of teacher educators and teachers immediately accessible as open educational resources. For that purpose, drawing on previous initiatives, an online community of practice is opened and cultivated on project phase III with teacher educators from Portuguese speaking higher education institutions that deliver initial teacher education programs. The purpose of the community is to favor the mainstreaming of results and to sustain initial teacher education practices beyond the duration of the project.